At age 9, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago until his family decided he was too young to be drawing nude models. He was then sent to work incognito in a soap factory until his identity was discovered.

Kirk joined the American Diplomatic Service in 1915. He managed the State Department budget for a time in the 1920s, and later said he thought it “an obligation” to spend the entire amount in order to support the argument for additional appropriations. While posted to Cairo, Kirk kept one house in the city for lunch, another near the pyramids for dinner and sleeping, and a houseboat on the Nile.

While posted to Berlin, he lived in an enormous mansion in the swank Grunewald neighborhood. A visitor described it as “one vast hall after another, and he quiet and alone in the midst of it. Very funny; a little like the theatre.” His staff of servants spoke only Italian. He held “a large buffet luncheon every Sunday noon, as a means of revenging himself for such hospitality as his position required him to accept.

In 1945 he attributed “his excellent health to the fact that he has never worn himself down by any form of exercise more violent than scratching, which he only does when suffering from insomnia at 6 a.m.”

A few years after Kirk’s retirement, as Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a campaign against suspected homosexuals in government, one investigator’s report charged that certain State Department employees “were very close personal friends of former Ambassador Alexander Kirk who is not now in the service but who had a very bad reputation of being a homosexual and certainly protected a lot of homosexual people.

He was a carryover from an older day when to be rich entitled you to be eccentric, and he made the most of the privilege. As a gesture of defiance, and in the indulgence of a fine sense of the theatrical, Kirk presented himself as the sort of American career diplomat of which the American philistine has always been the most suspicious: elegant, overrefined, haughty, and remote. His conversation consisted largely of weary, allusive quips.

Kirk claimed he escaped from diplomatic functions by whatever ruse the situation required. At one embassy in Rome he found it necessary to leave by a door he could only reach by going under a grand piano. “In a case of this sort, Kirk recommends slow motion, which, he says, often prevents witnesses from even noticing a maneuver which, if executed fast, might horrify them.”

Wonderful man! From a different aera, fin de siecle produced a very special breed..
McCarthy was a real piece of crap and I always stand in awe how this stupid bag of foul air mesmerized a whole nation.

I think he wanted to protect a kind of dreamland, a childhood all is well America of his imagination. And of course it was to be attacked by the badbad reds, while people like Lucania (alias Luciano) or “The Little Man” Lansky were hard working business men. I think he was as paranoid as Nixon and should have been removed from office at the beginning of the 1960s latest.
But I have to confess that I have never devoted meself to his biography. I understood that the FBI is a means of oppression but for some reason I do not understand, I never looked closely at Edgar. And no, I will not go and see the fillum, simply because Mr. diCaprio makes me puke. He mostly plays the obligatory piece of wood, and he’s good at that. At least.

On January 29, 2012 at 12:28 pm The King said:

Talk of soap always reminds me of prisons for some reason. I’m glad he wasted so elegantly, and I must try the slow motion trick myself at our next ball.